I was leaving a comment on Library Stuff, when I decided I should just air my opinions in my own forum, created specifically for the purpose. There’s a comment from Alan, the author of Blue Hole:

“It’s fine to point to a blog, but if you know a person’s full name and it’s not revealed on their blog, wouldn’t it be wrong to use that person’s full name in your pointer? I think yes.”

Now I think it’s clear that something personal prompted Alan to write this. If I’m wrong about that, then I’m a poor judge of tone in writing. Anyway, I tried to think back to any posts that we may have made with Alan’s full name in it. Couldn’t think of nor find any. Then I figured I would check the other place where I tend to list blogs: dmoz.org. Sure enough, Alan’s full name is sitting there in all its glory.

So looking through Alan’s blog, I tried to figure out how I knew his last name to include it in the listing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I go through no great effort to identify blog authors, but if the info is there for the taking, I’m gonna grab it. Well, I looked back at the editing logs for his category and sure enough, when it was first listed back in June, his last name was the domain name!! Doesn’t take a researcher to pull that information out of the magic hat.

So here are my points:

1. If you want anonymity on your blog, don’t do things like pepper your name onto the site. Don’t place an anonymous journal in a subdirectory of a site where you freely use your name (myprofessionalsite.com/blog). Don’t link to your resume. Don’t link to your organization that has a staff directory on its website, after you’ve just posted about how awful your life is as the Metadata Librarian for your organization. You get the idea.

2. If you are going to take steps towards limiting your exposure via your blog, consider letting the people who link to you know about it. In the case of dmoz, you would use the “update URL” link that’s available from the category page where your site is listed. Some people have done this and I believe they have found me to be quite amenable to such requests.

To answer back to Alan’s original question, I think it comes down to how you interpret “revealed.” Speaking only for myself, I peruse any information I’m given: the about page, colophon, resumes, first posts, links to the author’s other sites, etc. If your name is sitting in any of those places, that’s “revealed” in my mind. On the other hand, I’m not about to do a WHOIS search on domain names (even though that information is freely available).

See the difference? My goal is never to suss the author out; it’s to give the author as complete a listing as he/she makes possible. Most welcome the publicity and recognition. Some take exception to their own apparent vulnerability. Perhaps it’s better that a third party such as myself highlights the chink in one’s anonymity armor, so that steps can be taken to repair it before someone who counts notices. But again, if you take those steps, tell the highlighter!

Now that I’ve gone on entirely too long about that, here’s a bonus treat for those of you who’ve read this far - a picture of the house that we are seemingly about to purchase. Our third offer was agreed to today (actually yesterday, gosh it’s getting late) and so I thought I’d share our elation with the blogosphere. Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll show you the lake view from that deck coming off the right side of the house.